A day spent in the sky.
Long day yesterday - about 10 hours at the easel. I had to keep going while the paint was wet but I did manage to fit in a swimming lesson with Danielle (4.5yrs) at 3pm, which kept me going. Am letting that dry today and working on other stuff - gives me a break from the fumes too. I use Chroma Archival Oils (with odourless solvent) which is supposed to be low toxicity, but I think my body has developed a dislike for it over the past 5 years. I was even thinking of changing to watercolours last night - I've seen you can buy watercolour canvas on stretchers now from Frederix which looks pretty cool. Don't want to throw away all that I've learned about oil paint application though - and then there's the saleability of oils which is nice (but then there are a few artists like
Alvaro Castagnet who seem to do okay with watercolour). Maybe I'll switch oils to see if that makes a difference - or move my easel outdoors. That seems a bit more practical.
About the painting: The trickiest part about this was adding in the dashes of complementary colours once the initial paint layer was down. Mixing it too - pretty tricky to match very light values like that - and that's the key to getting those dashes of complementaries to shimmer - getting exactly the same value as that paint it's going on top of. Lovely effect when you get it right though - well worth the effort. (Note: a colour's complementary colour lies opposite it on the colourwheel eg. Blue's compliment is orange.)
Had a look at Thomas Kinkade's plein air painting
Capitola Village while I was doing this. Well he says it's plein air, but that's an awful lot of detail for an outdoor painting - I figure he finished it in the studio. Prefer his outdoor work to his other more popular stuff - much fresher - and a good outdoor painting always impresses me because they're just so hard to pull off.
The Design in Photoshop.
The underpainting in acrylic - 24x60" canvas.
The sky palette.
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